Kirk Wessler: It’s about time Mo State dances with NCAA stars

Wednesday

Barry Hinson is like an old-fashioned juke box. Two plays for a quarter. Ten for a dollar. Put your money in the slot and listen to him rock and roll all night.

Barry Hinson is like an old-fashioned juke box. Two plays for a quarter. Ten for a dollar. Put your money in the slot and listen to him rock and roll all night.

Our currency of choice Tuesday was a handful of questions about the NCAA tournament, the RPI and its role in selecting the tournament field, and what Hinson’s Missouri State Bears do now.

“I’m frustrated,” Hinson said. “I don’t know if I’m losing faith. But we’ve got to take the human element out of the process. Immediately. Immediately.”

We interrupt this tune to provide some brief background, in case anyone has forgotten.

The RPI is a computer-generated ranking of college basketball teams. It is the most visible and controversial tool the NCAA selection committee uses to select and seed its championship tournament field in March.

In each of the last two seasons, and in three of the eight Hinson has been Mo State’s head coach, the Bears have been snubbed by the NCAA, despite having better RPI ratings than other teams invited at-large. The most infamous was 2006, when the Bears were rated No. 22 in the nation and set the all-time record for best RPI left home.

“Nothing surprises me,” said Jerry Palm, who runs CollegeRPI.com and is considered one of the foremost experts on the formula and NCAA bracketology. “Teams that get left out of the tournament invariably deserve to get left out. But ...”

And here it came.

“Missouri State (in 2006) is the only one I would dare to call an injustice. It wasn’t just their RPI. They did well in the conference. They won their BracketBuster, on the road, against a Wisconsin-Milwaukee team that went into the tournament with, what, a 10-seed. They did everything they could to get in. What else did they have to do?”

Well, the Bears could have won a Valley title, something they have yet to do during Hinson’s tenure, either in the regular season or the postseason tournament. This is something of which Hinson is well aware and wants to change.

Still, if Hinson had journeyed to Missouri Valley Conference Media Day with any notion of ignoring the past — and that’s a very big “if” — it vanished when he encountered Palm.

“If he can’t explain it ...” Hinson said. Then he took off on a riff that was filled with truth and frustration and some envy and a little exaggeration and, as almost always in Barry’s world, good ol’ Oklahoma-born humor.

“Let’s get one thing straight,” Hinson said in his trademark high-pitched, rapid-fire drawl. “Cinderella is the one that made the ball popular. It wasn’t the kings and queens. We all remember the Bryce Drews. We all remember Tulsa, eight minutes from the Final Four. We all remember George Mason. We remember the upsets. You can’t tell me half of them remember BCS vs. BCS in the first round.

“We all remember the little guys. As long as we let the little guys be part of the dance, we’re gonna have a prom. But once they stop doing that, prom’s over, boys, let’s go to Steak ‘n’ Shake.”

The Valley, with three Sweet 16 appearances in the last two NCAA tournaments, is shedding its image as a league of little guys. But it hasn’t been acknowledged as a big boy, at least not by the six so-called power leagues that form the core of the football Bowl Championship Series and dominate the NCAA Division I legislative process.

Scheduling remains difficult, as evidenced a year ago when Hinson threw down his offer to play Maryland in a home-and-home series, after Terps coach Gary Williams griped about the Valley placing four teams in the ‘06 tournament and bluffed interest in playing MVC teams. Williams, Hinson said, never responded, so Maryland isn’t on Mo State’s schedule this season either.

But Hinson has made another attempt to ramp up the degree of difficulty on his nonconference schedule. The Bears will visit Arkansas, Utah, Winthrop and Toledo, and play neutral-court games against Alabama and either Purdue or Iowa State.

“I wasn’t on HGH when I made this schedule,” Hinson said. “We decided to take a different route and see if that’ll work. If we can come out of this with an ounce of lean on our bones, it’ll be a big help for the conference race and a recipe for this squad to have an opportunity to play in the Big Dance.

“We’re gonna find out if it works. We’ve had the pretty RPI. We’ve had the nice dress. We’ve looked good coming in, but we just weren’t selected. Hopefully, this time, we’ll be the pretty girl that gets asked to dance.”